"Where are the adults?" This was one of the most compelling and
truthful Republican Party critiques of the Clinton administration.
Nevertheless, now that the previous regime is fading into the pastand
it can't fade fast enough for this libertarianwe must
still ask the question, "Where are the adults?"

Well, where are they?

I don't see any adults in either the Republican or Democrat Parties.
Further, if adults can be found anywhere, they should easily be
located within the ranks of the American Association of Retired
Persons (AARP)the most politically active faction in the
country.

Last November, the "adult" politicians caved in to the AARP pressure
and the country took another giant step toward national financial
suicide, not to mention the complete federal takeover of medicine,
when the Republican-dominated legislature passed the first major
expansion of the Medicare-Medicaid program since 1965. I say
"expansion" because the cost of this boondoggle is proclaimed to be
approximately $400 billion over 10 years. Politicians never get
their numbers right, as libertarian columnist Doug Bandow has
observed:

"In fact, every federal social program has cost far more than
originally predicted. For instance, in 1967, the House Ways and
Means Committee predicted that Medicare would cost $12 billion in
1990, a staggering $95 billion underestimate. Medicare first
exceeded $12 billion in 1975.

"In 1965, federal actuaries figured that the Medicare hospital
program would end up running $9 billion in 1990. The cost was more
than $66 billion.

In 1987, Congress estimated that the Medicaid Special Hospitals
Subsidy would hit $100 million in 1992. The actual bill came to $11
billion. The initial costs of Medicare's kidney dialysis program,
passed in 1972, were more than twice projected levels.

"The Congressional Budget Office doubled the estimated cost of
Medicare's catastrophic insurance benefitsubsequently repealed
from $5.7 billion to $11.8 billion annually within the first year of
its passage. The agency increased the projected cost of the skilled
nursing benefit an astonishing sevenfold over roughly the same time
frame, from $2.1 billion to $13.5 billion.

"And in 1935 a naive Congress predicted $3.5 billion in Social
Security outlays in 1980, one-thirtieth the actual level of $105
billion."
[Source]

Were there any adults in Washington DC, someone would have told the
retirement communitya long time agothat they didn't have the
moral right to shift the financial burdens of adulthood off onto the
younger generation.

Were there any adults in Washington DC, someone would have told the
retirement communitya long time agothat participants in
Medicare-Medicaid "benefit programs" are actually receiving stolen
property. The moral nature of the activity in question does not
undergo metamorphosis simply because the politicians describe it
using words such as "safety net" or "insurance benefit."

Were there any adults in Washington DC, someone would have told the
retirement communitya long time agothat with the cost of
medicine perpetually rising faster than the rate of inflation, that
a nation with a low birth rate and an aging population combined,
make Social Security/Medicaid-Medicare socialism financially
unsustainable. On second thought, I can't believe that this
fundamental economic fact is unknown to the retirement communitymore
to their shame.

Were there any adults in Washington DC, someone would have told the
retirement communitya long time agothat they should consider
the dangers of democracy. "What are the dangers of democracy?" the
reader might ask. Let us recall a little of our basic high school
civics and remember that the last thing the Founding Fathers wanted
for this country was a democracy.

The Founding Fathers were highly educated men who knew that
democracies are by nature unstable systems. They knew that on
average democracies last about 200 years whereupon they tend to
collapse into police states. Instability is injected into
democracies when the people learn that they can use the power of
government to steal from their fellow citizens without
Constitutional limitations of any sort whereupon the nation, in
question, goesfinancially speakingsupernova with a resulting
collapse into a police state.

The reader might point out that in this country we are a
Constitutional republic and not a democracy. While this is, in fact,
what the Founding fathers intended for us, where this nation's
finances are concerned we have, in practice, become a pure
democracy. Can the reader name any Constitutional limitations on
government spending that arein realityrespected by
politicians and the judiciary?

I can't.

All a politician has to say is that it is for the "general welfare"
and this immediately justifies spending on everything from baseball
stadiums, to "revitalization of the city" projects, to giving our
hard-earned tax dollars to foreign dictators, to buying our votes
with our own money, to anything and everything that might cross the
fevered political "mind."

This lack of self-control will lead to a future long lasting
depression together with a resulting declaration of an national
emergency as well as nationalization(whether directly or through
regulation, it doesn't matter)of all private enterprise. Isn't
this what happened during FDR's Great Depression? (See Jim Powell's
FDR's Folly)

Think I'm kiddingthat I'm being unnecessarily alarmist? If so,
then you don't understand the psychopathology that is a government.
Bear in mind that it was a long-standing depression that made Hitler
possible as well as the Hitler youth. If it can happen in Germany,
among some of most highly educated people in the world, then it can
happen here. All it takes is a long standing widespread emergency
and the resulting public outcry for relief will bring out new
oppressions.

Also, bear in mind the psychopathology that is a politician: 1) if
doing the right thing means giving up power then you can always
depend on a politician to do the wrong thing; 2) Politicians never
accept responsibility for the harm they cause us. Whenever their
precious plans for our lives fail to produce the promised result
they blame their failures on a) the free market or b) the opposition
party; or c) foreigners or d) big business. If you suggest to a
politician that his precious plans for our lives are stupid and were
formulated by an idiot, you will get a crash course in political
psychosis. Politicians are utterly predictable in this regard.

A future police state. This is the natural long-term consequence of
spineless politicians who refuse to "Just say no!" to factions who
believe that they should have access to their fellow citizens bank
accounts by force of government. It is the natural long-term
consequence of politicians who won't return the responsibilities of
adulthood back to the people. It is also the natural long-term
consequence of an "education" system design to train people into
dependency and subservience toward government.

James J. Odle is a splendid fellow who, unlike the vast majority of
so-called "public servants" has a real job in the private sector
performing real work, which a real employer voluntarily pays him to
perform.